Two Fronts twtce-5 Read online

  His head had just come up in alarm when machine-gun bullets stitched through the rear compartment of the lorry. Blood splattered. Men tried to topple, wounded or dead. The driver let out a hideous shriek. The machine slewed sideways and went into the sand. The driver’s foot must have come off the pedal, because it quickly slowed to a stop.

  “Out!” Walsh yelled. “Out and take cover!”

  Some of the men were already moving when he shouted. They got the wounded out of the lorry as gently as they could. One man they left behind: a 7.92mm round had gone in one side of his head and blown off most of the other. No medic would help him-nor would anything else this side of Judgment Day.

  Walsh ran around the lorry to get the driver out if he could. “It hurts!” the man moaned. “It hurts!” There was blood all over that compartment, too.

  But he was lucky, even if he didn’t think so. He’d got shot through the right nether cheek-no wonder his foot came off the accelerator! “Come on, dammit!” Walsh said, hauling him out from behind the wheel by main force. “That’s a Blighty wound, or it is if you don’t get hit again.”

  “Hurts!” was all the driver said.

  He was liable to get hit again. Walsh was liable to get hit, too. The Bf-109s still buzzed above the stricken convoy like wasps above a jam jar.

  Sure as hell, here came another one, seemingly straight at Walsh. Its machine guns winked malevolently. He fired his Lee-Enfield at it. He had a better chance of knocking it down than he did of flapping his arms and flying to the moon, but not a much better chance. He knew as much. He fired anyway. What did he have to lose?

  Bullets stitched through the sand all around him, kicking up spurts that got in his eyes and spoiled his aim-if a rifleman on the ground shooting at a fighter going upwards of 300 miles an hour could be said to enjoy anything so refined as aim.

  Then the Lee-Enfield fell from Walsh’s hands. All at once, they were both clutching his left calf. He didn’t know how they’d got there, but the damn thing hurt like blazes. Bright red blood seeped out between his fingers. That bubbling, obscenity-filled shriek came from his wide-open mouth.

  “Catch one, Sergeant?” a soldier asked.

  “Too bloody right I did,” Walsh answered, now through clenched teeth-he’d bitten down hard on that shriek.

  He took a hand away from the hole in his leg and fumbled for one of the wound dressings on his belt. He’d got scrapes and cuts and nicks in this go-round, but he hadn’t really got shot since 1918. He’d forgotten how very much fun it wasn’t.

  He unsheathed his bayonet and used it to cut away his trouser leg. The wound was through-and-through, but it didn’t look too bad. If it stayed clean, if it didn’t get infected … Like the driver, he’d got himself a Blighty one. It wouldn’t kill him, but he couldn’t possibly fight for some little while.

  Now that the first shock had passed, his fingers knew what to do. Gauze pads slowed the bleeding. More gauze and tape held the pads in place. If he had to, he might be able to stump along for a little ways, using his rifle as a stick.

  He didn’t have to. Stretcher-bearers lugged him and the driver with the wounded arse to an aid station. A doctor poured alcohol on Walsh’s leg, which almost made him rise off the canvas cot like Lazarus. “Sorry, old man,” the medico said, “but we do need to clean it out, what?”

  “Fucking hell … sir,” Walsh wheezed-doctors were officers by courtesy, and had to be treated as such. Tears ran down the veteran’s grimy, unshaven cheeks. “That hurts worse than getting hit to begin with.” The sawbones only shrugged. It wasn’t his leg.

  Chapter 9

  Willi Dernen trudged across Russia. He’d worn out a lot of boots here, and that despite the cobblers’ best efforts to make each pair last as long as it could. A German artillery barrage had torn up the ground. A few dead Russians lay in shattered foxholes. There was more military junk: a shattered helmet, a Mosin-Nagant rifle with a long bayonet, a puttee untidily unrolled and spread across the dirt.

  He walked past everything. Sometimes military junk came in handy. Sometimes, especially in Russia, it was booby-trapped. It wasn’t as if he’d never taken a chance. This morning, though, he didn’t feel like it.

  A hooded crow on the wing came out of the thin mist on his left, flew past him only a few meters away, and vanished into the mist on his right. Its harsh call faded in the distance.

  “Damn bird wants to stop for lunch, and we’re interrupting,” Adam Pfaff said.

  “Tough,” Willi answered. Except for being gray-and-black instead of solid, glossy black, hooded crows were just like the carrion crows they had farther west. That included their eating habits. Dead dog? Dead cow? Dead horse? Dead Ivan? Dead Landser? It was all the same-and all delicious-to them. “Ought to be a bounty on the stinking things.”

  His eye fell on Arno Baatz. The corporal was as awful now as he had been before he got wounded. Willi’d hoped a stay in the hospital would mellow him (actually, Willi’d hoped Awful Arno would get inflicted upon some other unit altogether, but no such luck). He wouldn’t be altogether unhappy to watch a hooded crow gorging on Baatz’s mortal remains. But if Baatz caught one, he was much too likely to stop something himself.

  Up ahead, a machine gun fired off a long burst. It wasn’t that close, but Willi clutched his Mauser more tightly all the same. Unless you were a raw, raw rookie, you needed only a moment to recognize the difference between an MG-34 and an old-fashioned, water-cooled Russian Maxim. The Maxim’s report was duller, and it couldn’t shoot nearly so fast. With its cooling jacket and heavy wheeled mount, it also weighed a tonne.

  None of which meant it couldn’t kill you or maim you. Once it got set up, it made a perfectly respectable murder mill. Other German soldiers’ heads also swung toward the gun, gauging distance and likely danger. Like Willi, his buddies decided the Ivans’ gunners weren’t aiming at them right now.

  Even Awful Arno didn’t need to read the tea leaves to figure that out. “Come on! Keep moving!” he bawled, his voice as nasty and raspy as a buzz saw biting into a nail.

  “Who appointed him Generalfeldmarschall?” Pfaff wondered out loud. “I don’t see the red collar tabs with the oak leaves or the baton.”

  Willi offered an opinion about where Baatz could stow his baton. Marching would have been uncomfortable had he put it there, but Willi wasn’t inclined to quibble about such details. By Adam Pfaff’s giggles, neither was he.

  “What’s so funny, you clowns?” Baatz growled. He couldn’t have heard what they were talking about, but he hated jokes on general principles-and because he suspected they were commonly aimed at him. He was commonly right, too.

  “A field marshal’s baton, Herr Unteroffizier.” Willi gave back the exact and literal truth.

  “A baton? Be a cold day in hell before you ever get your filthy mitts on one,” Awful Arno said, which was also true. To show what he thought of things, he added, “If you make field marshal-Christ on a crutch, if you make sergeant-the Reich is really and truly fucked.” He turned his glower on Pfaff. “And what the devil makes a baton worth laughing at, anyway?”

  By the look on Pfaff’s face, he was thinking about telling the corporal precisely what made it worth laughing at. That wouldn’t have done him any good, even if he might have enjoyed it for a little while. You had to understand when giving in to your impulses wasn’t such a good plan.

  Or sometimes you got saved by the bell. Willi’s head swung to the left, toward the north. If the noise had come from the other side, he might not have heard it. He’d squeezed off a lot of Mauser rounds by his right ear. It wasn’t much for catching small noises any more. It wasn’t so very much for catching large noises any more.

  These small noises got bigger too damn fast: the clanking rattle of panzer tracks and the belching rumble of diesel engines. Since they were diesels, those tracks had to be attached to Russian panzers-German machines all used gasoline motors. And those dinosaur shapes looming through the mist had sloping sides and t
urrets; they weren’t all straight slabs and right angles like German panzers.

  “They’re T-34s!” Willi shouted: the worst thing he could think of, basically.

  Awful Arno whirled away from Adam Pfaff. His Mauser leaped to his shoulder with commendable haste. He fired at one of the enormous Russian panzers. Nothing wrong with Baatz’s balls. His common sense left a bit to be desired, though-not that Willi had already seen as much time and again.

  Willi’s own balls wanted to crawl up into his belly. He feared even that wouldn’t save them. No German panzers were within kilometers, not so far as he knew. Panzer IIIs and IVs didn’t stand a great chance against T-34s themselves. Infantry, now … Awful Arno’s shot might make the Ivans notice him. It couldn’t possibly hurt the steel monsters.

  They said necessity was the mother of invention. As usual, what they said was a crock. Pure, raw panic sparked Willi’s invention. Fumbling at his belt, he shouted, “Shoot your flare pistols at them! Maybe in the fog they’ll think they’re seeing antipanzer-gun tracers!”

  He suited action to word. A red flare hissed toward the nearest T-34. And damned if the glowing flare didn’t look something like a tracer from an antipanzer cannon. The mist helped, too. It concealed Willi, and it extended the glowing trail the flare left behind in the air.

  Seeing how well the first one worked, Willi frantically fired off another flare. Pfaff sent his own red ball of fire at the oncoming enemy panzers, and then one more after it. Even Awful Arno got the idea. So did several other Landsers. If all those red fireballs really were antipanzer tracers, the T-34s were rushing headlong into deadly danger.

  You never could tell with Russians. Sometimes they would stolidly take poundings that would make Germans fly for their lives, and would ambush you after you thought they had to be knocked to pieces. But sometimes, if you took them by surprise, they’d run from their own shadows. Not always-not even close. But sometimes.

  This time. The Ivans didn’t expect foot soldiers to try to scare them off with flares. If they saw red fireballs flying their way, they expected guns that could smash even a T-34’s formidable armor. And, believing that what they saw was what they expected to see, they turned as fast as they could and roared away toward what they hoped was safety.

  “Well, fuck me!” Willi said, amazement and relief warring in his voice. “It worked. It really worked!”

  “Damned if it didn’t,” Pfaff agreed. “I’d kiss you if you weren’t so ugly and if you didn’t need a shave so bad.”

  “So would I,” Arno Baatz said. “That was quick thinking, Dernen.” By the way he said them, the words tasted bad in his mouth, but say them he did.

  “Yeah, well …” Willi scuffed the toe of his boot in the dirt like a schoolboy embarrassed on the playground. It wasn’t as if he wanted praise from Awful Arno. After a moment, he went on, “You see T-34s coming down on you, you’d damn well better come up with something in a hurry.”

  “They should put you up for a medal.” Pfaff looked pointedly at Corporal Baatz. Awful Arno pretended not to see him.

  Willi cared not a sausage casing for medals. He already wore the ribbon for the Iron Cross Second Class. He couldn’t imagine not winning that one, not when he’d been a Frontschwein since the war started. If they pinned the Iron Cross First Class on him, he didn’t see how his life would change. And his stunt wouldn’t have rated the Knight’s Cross even if he were an officer rather than a lousy Obergefreiter. “Hey, we’re still here,” he said. “Who cares about anything else?”

  France disgusted Aristide Demange. Well, when you got right down to it, damn near everything disgusted Demange. He supposed that meant he ought to feel at home again. He didn’t, though.

  French civilians had always disgusted him. He’d been all for bashing the Nazis in the teeth as soon as they showed they were growing some. If the French army had moved when the Boche’s troops marched into the Rhineland …

  It didn’t happen. France huddled behind the Maginot Line. Plenty of civilians-mostly rich ones, but not all-wanted to hop into bed with Hitler. Others wanted to roll on their backs and show the Germans their bellies. Hardly anyone wanted to take them on, dammit. Not even the French officer corps wanted another war with Germany. The officers didn’t trust England to help them out, and knew they had no prayer without her.

  Well, here it was heading toward four years after France found herself in the war whether she much wanted to be or not. The civilians still hated it. From everything Demange could tell, most of them would rather have kept on fighting Stalin.

  “No way in hell the Ivans would ever come this far,” said a gray-haired fellow drinking up his paycheck in an estaminet not far from the border with Belgium. “But the damned Boches, the Boches are right here.” In Demange’s ears, his northern accent made him sound halfway toward being a Boche himself.

  The lieutenant felt like smashing in his stupid face. He knew that would get him talked about. Now that he was an officer, it wouldn’t do much more. At worst, he’d get busted down to sergeant again. If he did, he’d be happier than he was now.

  But military discipline was a formidable thing. Instead of kicking the gray-haired con in the belly and then in the chops as he folded up like a concertina, Demange stubbed out one Gitane, lit another, and merely blew smoke at the bastard. “They won’t be so close once we push ’em back,” he growled.

  “Once we do what?” By the way the local gaped, Demange might have suddenly started spouting Hausa or Cambodian. When the man spoke again, it was with exaggerated reason, as if to an obvious lunatic: “Come on, Monsieur le Lieutenant. What are the odds of that?”

  He could read Demange’s rank badges. Well, not many Frenchmen of his age wouldn’t be able to. He’d probably done his time during the last war as a typist somewhere a hundred kilometers behind the line, pinching the cute secretaries on the ass every chance he got and worrying more about a dose of the clap than about gas or shell fragments.

  “We can do it.” Demange tried his own version of reason: “Honest to God, man, we can. The Germans are up to their chins in Russia. They couldn’t do two fronts last time, and they can’t now, either.”

  “They can bomb the crap out of us, though. They already have,” the other guy said.

  “As close as you ever got to them, I bet,” Demange retorted. So much for reason.

  “I did my bit last time,” the local said. Demange had already figured that out. The local’s tone disgusted him, too: full of a righteousness he’d already heard too goddamn often.

  “Yeah, you did your bit, and then you forgot about your patrie and hoped like hell the old patrie would keep on forgetting about you. Your kind makes me sick,” Demange snarled.

  “What do you want to do about it?” The gray-haired man reached for the bottle of pinard on the zinc-topped bar in front of him, so he wasn’t altogether a virgin at these games.

  But he’d never brawled with anybody like Demange, either. Pasting on as broad and friendly a smile as his ferretlike face would hold, the veteran set a soft hand on the other man’s shoulder. At the same time, he spoke mildly: “Well, pal, it’s like this-”

  Distracted by touch and voice, the local never saw the sharp, short left that buried itself in his soft midsection. “Oof!” the other fellow said, and doubled over. Demange didn’t kick him while he was down, but he sure did kick him on the way down. The local would need some expensive dentistry real soon, but Demange’s boots were thick enough that he didn’t care-the kick didn’t hurt him one bit.

  The bartender yelled and reached under the bar for whatever kind of peacemaker he kept there. Demange was too busy to worry about the fine details. One of the gray-haired man’s buddies grabbed him and spun him around. That was a mistake-the guy should have hit him from behind. Demange butted him with the top of his head. That did hurt some, but his skull was harder than the other clown’s nose. He felt it flatten out. This con hadn’t been pretty to begin with, but he’d be uglier now. Demange slugged h
im for good measure.

  Somebody did tackle him from behind then. A split second later, another soldier hauled the local off him and treated the bastard like a rugby ball. The technique of the savate left something to be desired, but never its sincerity.

  A split second after that, the whole crowded estaminet went berserk. There were more local tradesmen and farmers than soldiers in the joint, but the soldiers were mostly younger, in better shape, and more practiced at helping one another. They held their own and then some.

  Demange didn’t enjoy bar brawls. He didn’t shy away from them, but he would rather have drunk quietly and then picked up a barmaid or gone to the local maison de tolerance. One thing you had to give officers’ brothels: the girls were fresher and prettier than they were at enlisted men’s houses. Less jaded? Well, you couldn’t have everything.

  Just because he didn’t enjoy bar brawls didn’t mean he wasn’t sudden incapacitation on two legs when he found himself in one. As far as he was concerned, the Marquis of Queensbury was nothing but some English fairy. The only rule he recognized was to do unto others before they could do unto him.

  Furious whistles squealed outside the estaminet. “The flics!” someone yelled needlessly. The cops waded into the fray, which then became that rare and ugly thing, a three-cornered fracas. The flics had truncheons. They were-presumably-sober. But there weren’t enough of them for those advantages to help as much as they’d no doubt hoped.

  In short order, some of the soldiers and some of the locals had truncheons, while some of the flics didn’t. A policeman went out through the front window. Since it was covered over with plywood, he probably didn’t much fancy that. Demange didn’t think he would have.

  He rabbit-punched somebody on his way to the door. The evening had turned more strenuous than he really cared for. Once he pushed his way out past the blackout curtain, he paused and lit a Gitane. If German night bombers could spot the flare of a match from 6,000 meters, they deserved to score a hit. After he blew out the match, even the cigarette’s coal seemed bright.